Quote:
Originally Posted by darryl
Consider the following "thought bubble". Under this model we could even keep the life + 70, though life plus 5 or 10 would be better. For books, any assignment of exclusive rights would be for a 10 year period only with no right of renewal. After that the rights would revert to the author. However, the author cannot again assign or licence the book exclusively. For the rest of the copyright term the work would be subject to a statutory non-exclusive licence which anyone wanting to publish could take out.
I'd suggest Royalties payable would be 70% for ebooks and 50% for print books. Royalties would be calculated on the higher of the actual selling price and a minimum selling price to be set, indexed and reviewed regularly. Government or statutory bodies could administer the scheme, perhaps taking say a 1% share to cover costs. Security for payment of royalties could be required in appropriate cases. Movies we should simply stop considering irrelevant lifetimes and give copyright directly to the studio, with a term of say 20 years, possibly followed by a similar statutory licence regime. Real consideration of what is appropriate for each category and even sub-category of intellectual property can be considered in setting the terms and conditions.
I have not had the chance to consider the implications of this type of scheme in detail. It is just a "thought bubble". But it has the very real advantage of limiting the power of rights-holders, who have become basically a blight on the system and lead to real distortion. It would also see much more money going to the creators rather than the rights-holders. It also creates a further source of publicly available books at potentially very reasonable prices, a sort of quasi public domain. It seems to me such a system would be much closer to fulfilling the ideals contained in the US Constitution. It would not of course be perfect, but I suspect it would be a vast improvement. But even more unlikely than a return of life + 70 countries to life + 50.
It will of course be argued that the one time 10 year exclusive licence will not be enough for publishers to get an adequate return on their investment, and therefore will drive the offers to authors down or even eliminate them. Given the pattern of the vast majority of book and ebook sales this argument would not appear to be a very good one.
These ideas are not set in concrete. Perhaps I am mistaken and I have overlooked something which would make it unworkable. Perhaps others have ideas that would improve it. I'd be interested to hear opinions.
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Simpler (and it follows the current legal concepts) is - a property tax on copyrights. Corporations want to have perpetual copyright, then they have to pay to keep it every year. Don't pay and it gets seized by the government, and put into the public domain.
The cost of running this would come from the copyright tax itself. . . .